Saturday, April 21, 2001

Drive-In Massacre

1976

Directed by Stu Segall

Starring: some pasty, ugly 70s people who I hope are very ashamed of themselves


J-Rock's Review:

THIS MOVIE IS THE BIGGEST PIECE OF CRAP SINCE BLOODSTALKERS

I don't even know where to begin on this movie. Let me first state that this was another wonderful purchase from the $2 table at Video Update. That fact, plus the half inch of dust that the box had collected from having NEVER been touched, should have given me some idea as to what I was getting myself into. But nooooooooo....nothing can prepare you for the torture that is...Drive-In Massacre.


The first two minutes consist of a very very very very long and slow pan across an empty drive-in theater, which actually becomes partially obscured by a big black blotch covering the left side of the screen (which I should really be thankful for - anything that keeps you from seeing any part of this movie is a blessing). Then comes a laborious 10-minute scene combining the unbridled terror of cars pulling into the drive-in and the spine-tingling suspense of the OPENING CREDITS!!! Then the movie (at the drive-in) rolls, two people start to make out, but then the guy wants to hear the movie, so he reaches out to grab the speaker-thing. He takes about five minutes to stretch to reach it, so you know he's just waiting for death, which inevitably comes in the form of decapitation by sword. Then his woman (actually a very bad plastic stand-in) gets it through the neck.

Enjoy that crappy bloodbath folks, because if you're in this for the long haul with J-Rock, that's the last action you're going to get for a while...

The local police question the manager of the movie theater and the um, well, um, special guy who cleans up the parking lot. This 6 1/2 hour scene is made even more painful by someone's apparent brainiac decision to run an industrial fan in the background, making the dialogue nearly inaudible (don't get me wrong, that's a good thing). It turns out later that the manager and the cleaner guy were both carnies - one was a sword-swallower and one was a knife-thrower...plot point??? Hmm....?

It just gets worse from here, and I'm not going to give a full recap because, frankly, this movie isn't worth the time, so here's a quick run-through: more people get killed, the police think it's the cleaner guy, then they think it's the local peeping tom (complete with a house full of porn), then they think it's the manager. At some point in all this mess, they get a call that someone is running around a warehouse with a machete, and this results in an unnecessary and idiotic chase scene through the warehouse during which the suspect guy magically alternates between having a machete and a gun. They shoot him, and his hostage reveals that she is his daughter, and he had just escaped that morning from a mental institution. Fuck, this movie sucks.

The movie ends soon after this without them finding the killer, and over the final shot, they put up titles that say something about the killer still being on the loose at drive-ins across the country and blah blah blah, and then you hear a voice that's supposed to be your theater manager saying that there's a killer in the theater, and not to panic. Now I give them some credit for this - they actually thought that people would still be in the theater at this point.
This pile of horse shit is a serious competitor with Invasion of the Blood Farmers for worst of all time. I would literally pay money to have that 90 minutes of my life back. I can't believe that anyone involved with this actually thought they were making a good movie.

To prove this movie exists, check out the IMDb: Drive-In Massacre